May 17, 2011

The last of my patches is queued up to land, so I figured I’d post an update about the performance improvements I’ve been working on. I’m also just excited about how well it has all come together.

There were essentially 3 changes that mattered for performance on large trees.

Fixing iter_entries_by_dir() to preload the data in Repository- optimal ordering rather than by-request ordering. In large trees this was causing us to thrash and become pathologically slow. In the 70,000-file test tree, thrashing took about 3 minutes, the preloading version takes about 15s. This affected a lot of our commands, though I guess the next two fixes would actually reduce the number of commands affected by this.

Fixing several code paths to use optimized iter_changes() rather than the generic iter_changes(). The generic path walks both inventories iter_entries_by_dir() and compares them. Our 2a format Repository can do iter_changes without loading the whole tree. (It internally uses a hash_trie to store the inventory, and so nodes with matching sub-trees can be skipped for comparison.) This generally shows up as something that was taking 15s (to load the whole inventory) dropping to <2s for the improved comparison. (bzr revert and bzr pull were both directly impacted here)

Changing WT.set_parent_trees([one_tree]) to update itself using current_basis.iter_changes(one_tree), rather than setting the state from scratch. This basically adds another case where we can avoid reading the whole inventory state again, which is another 15s to <2s sort of change. This only showed up after fixing (2), because once the tree is loaded, the other actions are generally pretty quick. (bzr up, bzr pull)

This is the chart I put together for “whats-new-in-2.4.txt”. bzr-2.3.2 will have fix (1), but not (2) or (3), to give a feel for how much of an impact different fixes have had.